A manifesto for Marxists:
Jr, David R Carlin
A MANIFESTO FOR MARXISTS Since everything, as the ecologists remind us, is connected with everything else, we should not be surprised to learn that upheavals in far-away lands threaten career...
...Everyone of course knows this, and due attention has been give to this fact in every in-depth analysis of the amazing events which have been transforming the Soviet Union and its erstwhile satellites...
...The day has finally arrived when we can begin to evaluate Marxism dispassionately...
...This distinction between party and doctrine, already clear in the last decade or so of Stalin's reign, became more striking still following Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin in the Twentieth Party Congress in early 1956 and the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolt late that same year...
...But as a thinker he was third-rate, not the first-rate man his admirers imagine him to have been, nor even the second-rate thinker his enemies grant him to have been...
...after all, the Communist party of China still survives, not to mention Fidel, who, as ever, sits ninety miles off the American coast...
...We can critically examine it as a philosophy, as a sociology, as a theory of history, the same way we critically evaluate other philosophies, sociologies, and histories-that is, without being influenced in our judgments by any hopes or fears we may happen to have regarding communism...
...By then the distinction between being a Marxist and being a party member was sufficiently clear and renouncing the latter no longer involved renouncing the former, nor did embracing the doctrine entail embracing the party...
...David R. Carlin, Jr...
...Of course there was never a single, dominant interpretation of Marxism during these decades...
...As a prophetic force he stood in the first rank, shaking the world as few others have ever shaken it...
...that would be laughable...
...NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR CAREERS The decline and fall of communism in Eastern Europe represents a grave threat' to the careers of millions of government bureaucrats and party functionaries in those countries...
...at the same time Marxism as a doctrine continued to be treated with respect, even experiencing a revival when students from the 1960s entered into academic and scholarly careers in the 1970s and 1980s...
...Thus by the time of the Hitler-Stalin Pact (late August 1939) it had become virtually impossible to be at the same time a Communist and an intellectually respectable person...
...A MANIFESTO FOR MARXISTS Since everything, as the ecologists remind us, is connected with everything else, we should not be surprised to learn that upheavals in far-away lands threaten career prospects in the United States...
...and after Stalin there was no one who even pretended to be the pope of Marxism...
...They advertised themselves as true Marxists, while Stalin was characterized as at best a pseudo-Marxist, at worst an anti-Marxist...
...The time of testing is at hand...
...But is this real independence...
...True enough, the soul has given the appearance of living independently of the body for some time now...
...Marxist theory, remember, was first taken seriously by the world precisely 100 years ago, not because it was so intellectually compelling a theory that the world could not but attend to it, but because it was the theory that informed and inspired a great political party, the Social Democratic party of Germany, which had just emerged from a dozen years underground with repeal in 1890 of Bismarck's antisocialist law of 1878...
...Quite the contrary, there were, it seemed, nearly as many constructions of Marxism as there were Marxists...
...Can the soul survive the death of the body...
...The texts of Marx, it turned out, were no less susceptible to diversity of interpretation than were the texts of the Bible...
...Still the question remains: Can theoretical Marxism, no matter how distinct from the Communist movement, retain its prestige once that movement collapses...
...and to be a Stalinist was to subscribe to an interpretation of history and nature that was simplistic in content and servile in form...
...To be sure, they don't consider themselves to be Communists...
...Henceforth the Communist party became increasingly ridiculous in the eyes of Western intellectuals...
...There was the amiable Marxism of Erich Fromm, the existential (and quite unami-able) Marxism of Jean-Paul Sartre, and the less celebrated Marxisms of a hundred and one academics...
...He hasn't been overrated as a dynamic force, as a kind of secular prophet...
...Even now, of course, it doesn't quite live in such a world...
...long ago the surgical separation between the Communist party (a vulgar thing) and Marxism (a refined thing) was achieved...
...Numerous historians, sociologists, political scientists, even an occasional economist and literary critic, consider themselves to be-in some sense of this elusive or at least semi-Marxists...
...And what will that dispassionate evaluation reveal...
...Or only the illusion of independence...
...This is not the first moment in the twentieth century when theoretical Marxists have had to distance themselves from communism...
...By the 1930s, as the dark night of Stalinist orthodoxy closed in on the Soviet Union and the Comintern, Marxists of the anti-Stalinist type formulated versions of Marxism which allowed them to differentiate themselves from Stalinism...
...Yet no one had to give up being a Marxist on that account...
...for to be a Communist was to be a Stalinist...
...Far from it...
...But however careful these academic Marxists have been to keep their skirts clear of the mud of everyday communism, the question remains: Can their careers continue to thrive once the great movement that took Karl Marx as its prophet and author of its sacred scripture stumbles and falls...
...I say it with some regret, since I've spent many an enthralling hour studying Marx over a period of many years, but my guess is that we'll finally conclude that for the past century-the century of the "red menace"-Marx has been overrated as a thinker by both friend and foe...
...But what has not received due notice is the threat the collapse of communism represents to the careers of thousands of American academics...
...My recommendation, therefore, to American academic Marxists is that they diversify their intellectual investments, for their Marxist expertise is about to become a drag on the market.rag on the market...
...But the hour is late...
...Never until today, then, has theoretical Marxism had to face the prospect of living in a world devoid of a great Marxist political movement...
Vol. 117 • April 1990 • No. 7
